Monthly Archives: March 2018

In a blog post from earlier this month, we dissected Google Adwords. In today’s blog post, we are going to cover the traffic types by channel. On Google Analytics, you can measure how your marketing strategies are performing on social media platforms, search engines, emails, and third-party listing sites.

Organic Traffic – Traffic that comes through optimizing for search engines. This means any link that is clicked on search engine page results (SERP) that is not an ad (ads are marked with a little “ad” symbol). It can also be called “natural traffic.”

Direct Traffic – When someone types your URL directly into the search bar or has your URL (or a link on your site) saved as a bookmark.

Display Traffic – These are the display ads that show up when users visit a website outside of your own. Google has so much information that they have lists of specifically targeted users to whom you can show your ads. Display campaigns tend to have higher bounce rates, between 60-80%, since these are being shown on different sites and are when the user is not actively searching for your company or service.

Social – This is a section in Google Analytics that pools in traffic from all of your social sites. This does not include paid advertisements.

Facebook Advertising – This is traffic coming from our Facebook campaigns. You want to differentiate this traffic in Google Analytics so you can see the difference between Organic Facebook Traffic (natural clicks from your normal posts) and Paid Facebook Traffic (sponsored posts, campaigns etc.).

Paid Search – This traffic source is all paid search advertisements in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Paid search is one of the most important sources to track and optimize to ensure you are reaching the ROI you desire.

Referral – If you use a third-party listing site, any traffic driven to your website from these other sites are considered referral traffic. For instance, say you have a profile for your company on a site that lists other companies, such as Angie’s List, Home Advisor, etc., and someone clicks your website. This would be considered referral traffic.

At Sperling Interactive, we use Google Analytics to track how our clients’ online marketing strategies are performing. To learn how we can help you, call us at (978) 304-1730.

A responsive website is one that provides a good user experience to all devices and every screen size. If you’re a business owner, having a responsive website is crucial as a website is really an extension of your business. In this day and age, most people first discover a business through its website. Here are our biggest tips on how you can build a responsive website that your visitors will love.

Ask yourself, what features are important for my audience? Asking this question can help you come up with the design and layout for your website. For example, if you run a brick and mortar store that also has an ecommerce, you’ll want to make sure the website is setup for a shopper. This means having any special offers in the header section of the site, having a find-in-store feature, and a ‘related items’ feature.

Use a fluid grid. A fluid grid is one way you can layout the different versions of your website. A fluid grid deals with percentage value instead of pixels, and is a tool that enables web designers/developers to create dynamic websites for all devices.

Utilize Google’s resizer. Resizer is an interactive program where you can test out your design on desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.

Add media queries to your code. Media queries is what allows you to adapt conditions such as screen resolution (mobile screen vs. desktop screen). By adding this to your code, it allows you to adapt the size of the screen, depending on the device.

Pay attention to your navigation. Your navigation is arguably the most important part of your website as it serves as the site’s guide. It also impacts your traffic and search engine rankings. With that said, make sure the navigation is either horizontal across the top of pages or vertically on the left hand side of pages.

Be mindful of the webpages. Another important thing you should do is make sure the names of your web pages accurately reflect what users will find on those pages. You should also determine what will be the most viewed pages on your site, that way you can ensure they are the first things people see.

Don’t be afraid to leave things out. A responsive website doesn’t necessarily mean every version of your website looks identical. What’s most important is that each version of the website maintains the brand’s identity and has the same general feel. Determine what images or design elements work and leave out those that don’t.

At Sperling Interactive, we can create custom websites that fit the needs of each client. This means evaluating the intended audience to structuring a site that meets their viewing habits.

If you’ve been tasked with managing your business’ Google Adwords Account, you’ve probably discovered by now that it’s no easy feat. In order for your ads to perform well, you need to be able to understand the dashboard. Here is a break down of what the acronyms and terms that appear on it mean, as well as tips to improve your ads’ performance.

Keywords – These are the words or phrases that someone searches in the Google search bar. You bid on keywords so your company can show up at the top of the results. Clicks – This one is pretty obvious. Clicks represents the amount of times your ad was clicked on. Having a high amount of clicks is always a good thing. After conversion, clicks are the second most important way people should be interacting with your ads. Google Adwords counts clicks even when users don’t go to your website so this may be why your amount of website visitors are different than your clicks. Impressions – Impressions are the amount of times your ad appeared. While a high volume of impressions may sound impressive, what matters most in terms of an ad’s performance is how many people click on your ads and engage with them.Impression Share – Impression share regards to how many times your ad is shown against other competitors for the same keyword in search ads. If you have an impression share of 20%, that means you are only showing 2 out of the 10 times that search query happened. Healthy impression shares range from 60-80%. CTR (click-through rate) – CTR is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown.Average CPC (cost-per-click) – Average CPC is the average amount you’ve been charged for a click on your ad. The amount is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. Average Position – This is in relation to the position of your ad and where it is shown in a Google search. Generally, 1-8 lands your ad on the first page of search results, 9-16 lands on the second page of Google search results, and so on. Average positions can be between two whole numbers. For example, an average position of “1.7” means your ad usually appears between positions 1 or 2. Generally speaking, if you are running a Google display campaign, you will always be 1 because there are no “ad positions”. A good average position is generally between 2 – 3.5 since you are at the top but not paying too much to be the first ad showing. Search Query – This is almost the same as keyword, but there are some differences. It is the actual words someone typed into Google. We could be bidding on the keyword “business start-up” and a search query such as “how to start up a business” would trigger our ads since it contains those keywords. PPC (pay per click) – The type of advertising when you pay only when your ad is clicked.Cost– Cost deals with how much was spent on the campaign. Remember, you only spend money on your ads when people click on them. You can use Google Adwords Industry Benchmark to find out if what your spending is lower or higher than the average in your industry. Max CPC – The Max CPC is the highest amount you’re willing to pay for somebody to click on your ad. So if you set a maximum bid of $1.50, you’ll never pay more than $1.50 for each click on your ad. The more money you put down on your Max CPC, the higher positioning your ad will have on a page. Remarketing – This is another type of display but much more targeted. We track users who visit your site and then show them display ads across the Internet after they leave, enticing those to visit your site and convert. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – The pages that appears after someone requests a search from a search engine.

Conversions – Conversions represent how many responded to your ad after clicking on it. Conversions deal with actions and can mean many things. A conversion can be somebody viewing the video you published on the page, a person filling out the contact form on the landing page, a person buying the product advertised, etc.

Cost Per Conversion – Cost/Conversion is the average cost per conversion. This is calculated by dividing the total cost for clicks by the number of conversions. Knowing your Cost Per Conversion is important as it can help you divet up your budget better.

Conversion Rate – Conversion rates deal with how often cicks resulted in conversions. Some ways you can improve your conversion rate are by switching up your offer, doing A/B testing on your ads, reevaluating your copy so it accurately depicts what you’re offering, and redesigning your landing page.

Want to learn more about Adwords? Call Sperling Interactive to uncover more about Adwords and how we can help you.

Having a strategy to grow your email list is crucial as your list decreases 22.5% every year due to people either moving companies, unsubscribing, or deleting their email address. According to research, more than 90% of adults use email and 74% of teenagers have an email address. With that said, it is clear that email marketing can help you effectively reach any age bracket. Here are some steps you can take to get more people on your mailing list.

Use social media to promote offers that require an email address. When doing offers or giveaways for your business, posting about them on social media is always a must. Next time you do this, require people to send you their email address. Make sure you direct people to a landing page where they can fill in their email address instead of having people message you their email address.

Collect email addresses at trade shows. Never attend a trade show without bringing a bowl for people to put their business cards in or a list for people to write their email address down. Now there is a way to always reach out to prospectives you met there.

Include the registration link to your newsletter when you guest blog. Guest blogging is not only a great way to introduce new people to your business, but you can also use it as an opportunity to display links to your social media channels and your newsletter sign up.

Do giveaways. Everyone loves a good giveaway, and this will become a popular way for you to gain more email addresses.

Attend a networking event and/or host one. Networking events are always a great chance to meet new business people, find new business opportunities, as well as grow your list.

Include a subscribe button on your website. Your website is an extension of your business and is a common place for people to join your email list.

Include the registration link in your email signature. Direct people to a landing page where they can sign up.

Need an email template that encapsulates your brand? At Sperling Interactive, not only can we create that template for you but we can also create a stellar email marketing campaign to help you stick out as a unique business in inboxes.

Now that the dust has settled from the holidays, media gurus are getting a better sense of what is going to explode this year in marketing and advertising for B2C businesses.

AMP Story. This trend is for any publishers and news outlets reading this. Google is following in SnapChat and Instagram’s footsteps by hopping on the story train. Unlike SnapChat and Instagram, AMP Story is not an app. It will be featured on both the mobile and desktop versions of the web and will lean heavily on images and visuals to broadcast news. Google hopes publishers and news outlets will use AMP Story to produce new content, not repurpose current content.

Omnichannel Marketing. There are many ways for B2C businesses to connect with their customers.Omnichannel marketing involves looking at your business from your customer’s perspective and providing a strong customer-friendly experience across all channels in which you interact with them, be that through your physical store, website, social media channels, email marketing, etc. Through the omnichannel marketing approach, every channel is inter-connected so the customer views the brand in a positive light. Omnichannel marketing focuses on analyzing data to assist with the customer satisfaction of your brand and so the customer encounters the same experience and messaging everytime they interact with the brand.

According to Emarsays, a leading provider in marketing software, companies that have “well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies in place achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average, compared to organizations without omnichannel programs in place.”

Chatbots. Chatbots are getting bigger because artificial intelligence is getting better. They can not only help you answer queries from prospective customers or clients, they can be used in your sales funnel. According to Entrepreneur.com, chatbots can also provide personalized shopping advice to users based on their past shopping history.

Are you a B2C business? At Sperling Interactive, we can design your website, optimize your website for the web, photograph your products, post content to your social media, and rebrand your business.

At a webmaster conference in mid-February, Google announced that starting sometime in March it would prioritize indexing the mobile version of a website over the desktop version of a website. What this means is Google is going to start ranking its search listings based off the mobile version of a site.

It should be noted mobile-first index is an experiment Google is running and the reason they are doing this is because desktop search queries are continuing to drop. As of 2017, 60% of searches are done through a mobile device, a 10% increase from the previous year, making the mobile version of the web the primary search engine people use.

If you don’t have a mobile version for your website, Google said it will still index your site. If you do have a mobile version, Google requests that all of the pages remain the same on both versions. With this new indexing system, Google has stated web pages that are not mobile friendly will not perform well. Now more than ever, it’s important to make your entire website mobile friendly as sites that do have a mobile friendly experience are expected to potentially receive a boost even for searches done on a desktop. In theory, if your content is optimized for mobile, there shouldn’t be any big impacts with how your site performs in search results.

Another factor you should think about before this ranking system rolls out that will affect your ranking is the speed of your mobile version. Google will also take into account your title tags and heading tags when ranking and if your images are optimized for mobile.

Google is planning on only having one indexing system in the future instead of different indexing systems for mobile and desktop. This indexing system will serve both mobile users and desktop users. This indexing system will just focus on mobile content. As Google’s mobile-first indexing continues to improve, the goal is to make it be the only system used.

At Sperling Interactive, we can not only build you a mobile version of your website, we can also optimize it to perform well in search results too.